7 ms·

What the ad blocker debate reveals

104 points by eamonncarey 11y ago

danr4 11y ago
It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice. Want to make money? try a subscription model. Why can't you have both? Welcome to the real world. [EDIT]: This was the previous opening sentence: "Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free." I changed it to a better analogy offered by AndrewKemendo in hope people would stop picking the analogy apart and focus on the message it's trying to deliver.
- bpodgursky 11y ago
  "Simple" doesn't mean correct. In practice cutting out ads probably makes you a more valuable customer because you've spent 10x the time most people spend looking at ads inspecting them while cutting. (and don't give any BS about "oh I actively avoid brands that advertise" -- brand advertising works, deal with it) The better analogy is, you cut out the ads, reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers. In the real world, this is not going to be legal.
  - howeyc 11y ago
    I don't see where you're getting the "reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers" based on how ad blocking works. Ad block is at an individual level, there is no redistribution.
  - afandian 11y ago
    There's no redistribution. Why does your analogy include redistribution? There's no need for an analogy anyway. It's equivalent of receiving a free magazine and the user putting it through an automatic ad-censoring machine before reading it.
  - luso_brazilian 11y ago
    An even more apt analogy would be if a third party made an easy to use glass overlay that, when placed over a magazine page, obscured all the ads leaving only the content visible. Considering that is applied voluntarily and "client side" and no redistribution takes place I'm not sure that would be illegal considering current laws. Despite of that I believe publishing companies would be lobbying for laws to curb that practice as soon as it achieved critical mass and high enough adoption.
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      All of the analogies given miss some major issues. Visual adds aren't the problem. Audio adds, adds that consume massive bandwidth that is limited, and add that track are all the problem. Normal visual adds can sometimes be nice, letting me know about products that I didn't previous know about that I might actually want to buy. But being tracked? Nope. Blocked!
  - danr4 11y ago
    As stated in another comment, cutting them out can be an hypothetical ad cutting machine I 3D printed. The implementation detail of how i'm cutting out the ads is beside the point. The point is that I can offer my ad cutting services for free to anyone. I can tell all my friends - "Hey guys i'll come to your house and cut the ads out of the free magazines you're already receiving" Which is definitely not the same as "Hey guys I've received this magazine, and I cut the ads, here's the PDF" The reprint and redistribution parts are non-existent in ad blockers. the content is not hosted on adblockersite.com.
- CSMastermind 11y ago
  Newspapers have successfully used a combination of subscription and advertising for a century now.
  - eli 11y ago
    Maybe not the best example: http://i.imgur.com/0mgT0AR.jpg http://i.imgur.com/0mgT0AR.jpg
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Not how up to the .com bust the newspapers were actually making more money than before. The collapse of the market took a heavy toll, both on newly minted online media as well as on established media that had made the jump to online.
      - eli 11y ago
        The downturn in revenue also coincides with the rapid expansion of Craigslist, which devoured the previously pretty reliable classifieds revenue. But print readership was going down for a while before then. TV news was on the rise. I think it was a lot of factors at once.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  I would pay for the NY Times or Washington Post if I knew having a paid subscription would remove the ads and give me a reasonable reading experience.
  - eli 11y ago
    The problem with removing ads for paying subscribers is that it greatly devalues the remaining ad impressions -- who would want to reach just the people too disengaged or cheap to buy a subscription? It also incentivizes the site owner to have increasingly obtrusive and annoying ads for non-paying members.
    - moron4hire 11y ago
      So how does Reddit manage to have ad-less subscriptions and yet still restrain themselves from creating obtrusive interstitial ads? Superhuman strength? Immortality? Some other heretofore unknown super power? The truth is, there is nothing on the NY Times or WaPo that is worth paying twice for.
      - eli 11y ago
        Reddit has its users create all the content for free. And AFAIK they still aren't profitable.
        jacquesm 11y ago
        You'd hope that the content produced by newspapers would rise above the level of reddit leading to people wanting to pay for the content directly. Of course if people are looking for entertainment then that's a different story and reddit may be serious competition.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        One would hope. The problem is, content produced on Reddit (and HN) is way better than content produced by newspapers, by a very simple mechanism: someone posts an article to Reddit/HN, people start debunking all the bullshit, misinterpretations and lies journalists wrote in that article. Newspapers have a lot of trust to regain with people. But then again, I suppose the general population doesn't give a rat's ass about the truth, and want to read only something shocking to use as a "social object" (i.e. something you can start discussing with other people you meet).
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  > Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Uh ? To cut the ads out you need to see them. Adblock hide them as if they never existed in the first place. Analogies, these days...
  - pjc50 11y ago
    You can (and I do) from time to time cut out ads manually from the web with the DOM inspector. It's particularly good for screen-filling modals. Of course I can then make the cutout permanent with a hosts file or user-configurable adblocker ...
  - danr4 11y ago
    Alright i'll bite. "I can cut them out" can be, as stated in another comment, an ad cutting physical machine. Your move.
  - toyg 11y ago
    you could hand the magazine to a 3-year old who can't read, and he'll cut out all pictures for you. Nitpickers, these days...
    - johnchristopher 11y ago
      Are you really saying you would let a 3-year old operate that ad cutting physical machine mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995459 ? Adults, these days... :]
      - toyg 11y ago
        My 3-year-old is perfectly fine with a pair of safe scissors, as long as we keep him away from curtains and other should-not-cut materials. Luckily, we have no need for ad-cutting on kindle...
- Nursie 11y ago
  I think it's simple too, but doesn't need a meatspace analogy like that. I request some data, you send me some data. My computing device (yes MY computing device) then renders it in accordance with my wishes. That's it. (oh, and no, I have no obligation to play ball with your trackers)
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That's why in the War on General Purpose Computing, publishers and advertisers are on the side of making the computing device not yours.
  - jfoster 11y ago
    I actually think the people running sites are better off with this becoming the norm. Ads are not a great way to make money. Low friction paywalls will be great for everyone.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. I think you have the chain of events backwards. You are describing spam. A better analogy is that there are a hundred magazine providers waiting by your fence and then you ask them to throw you their magazines. You are right though that the consumer is empowered with technology to block or not block - but the broader problem is that consumers have shown over time that they aren't willing to pay for content (at scale) so they are left with making money somehow.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    It's like going to the stand and asking for a magazine. You have it given to you for free. Now it's yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, including giving it to a 3-year-old child to cut out the ads and throw them in a bin, so that you don't have to ever see them. It's yours, you have a right. Giving away the magazine for free was the choice of the person at the stand. If they want to profit, they have various means to do this. Ads are one way. Asking you for money when you ask for the magazine is another.
    - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
      Agreed. To extend the analogy though the customer sees the free one next to a quality paid one, chooses the free one and then complains about it having ads in it. At the end of the day, everyone wants a great experience for nothing. It's not possible.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        > Agreed. To extend the analogy though the customer sees the free one next to a quality paid one, chooses the free one and then complains about it having ads in it. To improve it even further, based on my own experience and what I see in comments here, apparently you have like 1 quality paid stuff per 10 paid scams, 10 paid pieces of crap and 100 free stands. Those who want to pay for quality content quickly discover that it's incredibly hard to find. The analogy breaks down on the nature of the ads themselves. In physical magazines, ads are static and occupy fixed space on the pages. The off-line equivalent to what we have on-line would be ads carried by bugs inside the pages - moving, making sounds, hard to get rid of and occasionally biting you so you get sick and need to seek time-consuming and/or expensive care. Ads on-line are actively hostile. > At the end of the day, everyone wants a great experience for nothing. It's not possible. I agree.
- chmike 11y ago
  Exactly and for the subscription model to work provide quality content.
- austenallred 11y ago
  This comment rubs me in the wrong way. Content creators aren't "putting it up for free" - they're putting it up with ads attached. They're certainly not "throwing it over your fence." They're not injecting their articles into your browser, you're going to a URL to request them. You seek the content out. So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. That is what the company offered. Some of that is what allowed the company to create the content. You elect to not display that part using your client. I suppose that's your prerogative, but don't pretend like you're the victim in this. And also don't pretend like it's the company's fault for not choosing your preferred business model. You don't get to choose other companies' business models for them - you can either accept or reject what they offer. The reason they're not on a subscription business model is probably because that wouldn't be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    > So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. > You elect to not display that part using your client. That's not how ad-blockers work. They prevent ads from downloading. And so sites load faster, and mobile users pay less for throughput.
    - javery 11y ago
      This is not completely accurate - most ad blockers include both request blocking as well as content blocking. For instance it might not be able to block a sponsored tweet since it is returned with all of the other tweets, but it can hide that div on the page. Check any block list and you will see both rules.
      - mirimir 11y ago
        OK, thanks for the clarification. Nonetheless, many sites do load dramatically faster with ad blocking. That's especially so with high-latency connections. I often use Tor through nested VPN chains, and total latency can be 1-2 seconds. Some sites are unusable without AdBlock and NoScript.
  - 11y ago
- jerf 11y ago
  Oh, the memories. I haven't seen this metaphor fight in like 8 years now, since web annotation basically died. And here we finally are with a version of this debate that people actually care about, because there's actual money at stake. Finally my years of prep are ready to pay off! First, I suggest everyone resist metaphors. Physical metaphors don't work here at all. For one thing, the "free content" may in the future decide that you can't load the content in the page until after the ads and trackers confirm that you have indeed loaded their content and executed it to some degree, which wrecks every physical metaphor you can come up with. Physical content is dead. Web content is code. It gets to do code-y things. No physical metaphor will keep up. Next, this obviously produces an arms race. The first iterations of this will be stupid and client-side, because it's cheap. When that doesn't work, server-side things can be done so that at the very least, you must download the ad; that can be confirmed fairly well in a non-forgeable way. The ads will also run arbitrary bits of code in an attempt to verify that they've really been shown; the client side plugins will retaliate by simulating the relevant code and not actually showing the ad. With the current state of web technology, this would stabilize in a sort of middle ground, where the client-side correctly doesn't render the ads, but the requisite requests to convince the server that you can see the content would by necessity still leak tracking information in order to convince the servers to show it at all. You could try to do things like use client-side stuff to scramble those values and share them among users or something, but that's fairly easy to detect at scale. Where that becomes particularly relevant though is that the clients at this point are becoming increasingly outright deceptive and duplicitious. Instead of passively failing to render ads, actively deceiving the remote systems opens a new door both legally and ethically. At some point after this the publishers have both a legal and ethical case that you are not merely "experiencing the content as you wish", but actively defrauding them. This, of course, won't stop people from arguing they have a right not to be tracked or advertised at, which means that they will essentially be arguing in favor of a right to have their programs make fradulent requests in order to get this "free" content. Which is fine and dandy locally, but consider what that means globally... and in particular, at this point how do you argue that it's ethically wrong to put trackers and ads in content, and for that matter even spyware, if the "other side" is retaliating in kind? If you're not careful with the ethics here you surprisingly find that you end up arguing in favor of the very things you thought you were arguing against, and end up making a "good for me but not for thee" argument, which even if you do end up believing that is still not a very powerful or compelling ethical/legal position. Pardon if I'm leaping about 4 steps further down the road than most people here are at... I worked this all out about 12 years ago. (It's a bit dated now and I cringe a bit at the writing style, as befits any writer linking to something they wrote 12 years ago, but you can see what I worked out at http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics . Perhaps remarkably, it is dead on topic for this very debate... there's a lot of related issues here.)
- felipeerias 11y ago
  "Here is the deal. I will tell you a story. But not just any story: an amazing story about this one person who did something unbelievable and you can't guess what happened next and also cats. In exchange, all you have to do is let these people (whom I don't actually know) track you and run their software on your computer, which will present a garish display of images (and maybe also sound and video, did I mention that I don't know these guys?). All you have to do then is click and I will get paid a fraction of a cent (and you will have to deal with whatever crap comes up afterwards). So what do you say?"
  - voidz 11y ago
    Sounds like an offer I can't refuse! /i
- userbinator 11y ago
  my reading experience, my choice I'd extend that to say "my eyes, my ears, my brain." If I have the right to mute the volume, change the channel, or otherwise do something else when adverts appear on the TV, then I should also have the right to block them on a webpage - we're just using available technology to help us do it more effectively.
- jusben1369 11y ago
  To keep with the neighborly analogy what's happening is your neighbor is opening up his garage and lining it with magazines and comfortable seating for you to sit for free and read. However he's also lining his driveway with folks pitching you on goods and services on your way there. You're saying to heck with that and jumping over the fence right near the garage entrance and popping straight in. Your neighbor knows that type of abuse can occur and it's really up to them to decide how they want to handle it. But to pretend that you and he and the advertisers don't understand the implied relationship is disingenuous. For all those saying "get a subscription model!" remember this. A subscription model, by its very definition, implies that both of us expect a repeat, longer term relationship. Understand if that's the only way to monetize content on the internet it'll change the type and way content is created.
aikah 11y ago
> We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.” Something's fishy here. Is there any googler here that can respond to these claims ? > “Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at…Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? …[A]ny argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.” my thoughts exactly. "People" told the same things to the music industry. "You can't adapt, you should die", well let's see how ad networks and content producers survive the adblock revolution.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    > what is to stop the ad being switched to something else (video, pr0n eptc) on the 3rd party server? That's when you're lucky. If you're unlucky it's malware injected via ad networks. Browsing the web without an adblocker is like sex with multiple partners every day without a condom.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Exactly. People don't block ads because they don't want content providers to get compensated. They block ads because they're actively hostile.
    - VLM 11y ago
      Bad analogy because that could be fun, although diseased. Ads are not fun. Its more like being a paramedic/EMT and not being allowed to wear gloves on call at blood covered scenes. Well I'm sorry that corporate policy won't let you wear gloves anymore but "we have to" keep profits up for the hepatitis and HIV treatment drug industries so you'll just have to deal with it. A standard HN automotive analogy would be working as a car mechanic while not being allowed to wear safety gear.
Donzo 11y ago
Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.
- FroshKiller 11y ago
  I personally never bothered with ad blocking until every other site hit me with stupid landing pages (like on Forbes), exhortations to try their mobile app instead of their site (every Tapatalk-enabled forum ever), pleas to take a feedback survey before I've even seen anything that warrants feedback (MSDN), and modal ads that don't load until I try to scroll down to continue reading the content (soooooooooooo many blogs).
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    It has really gotten bad. It's all a desperate grasp for ever shrinking ad dollars. Users get wise to the tactics and develop coping behaviors. You can track our eye movements and see we don't ever once even look at the common areas where ads lie. Popup boxes get closed in less than a second, with many people not even registering that it ever opened [0]. I've personally taken to sliding my cursor past the top edge of the page to see if the "subscribe to our mailing list" dialog appears, in some cases bailing on the article completely just because it's not valuable enough to me to bother after that affront. Major advertisers are swooning over 0.5% click through rates! That's not just random chance, that's a set of users highly-trained in the art of dodging ads, with an extremely-low-but-not-yet-zero failure rate! Advertising is dead. Good riddance. [0] Which has also killed the modal informational dialog in desktop applications. I've ran training sessions for internal enterprise software and the users literally could not remember there was a dialog mere seconds after dismissing it.
    - AnonymousPlanet 11y ago
      You seem to easily shrug off your conclusion. But it makes me shiver to think about that future. If advertising is dead, what else is Google going to do with all that data it has on us? Sell to the highest bidder?
cstross 11y ago
A secondary effect: ad blockers not only improve the web experience for users (making everything load faster, by blocking unwanted spurious crap), ad blockers are good for the cellcos as long as net neutrality holds true. Absent net-neut cellcos could in principle charge advertisers for access, but in a net-neut environment there's no money to be gained by carrying the traffic. Traffic which impairs the UX for the paying customers (the smartphone and tablet users). This is going to be an interesting dilemma for that strong proponent of network neutrality, Google, uh, DoubleClick, right? (Unless they go the third-order route and roll out their own LTE data network, where of course they'll be the advertising gatekeeper and maybe folks who DPI indicates are using ad blockers will get a reduced speed of service ...)
alkonaut 11y ago
I understand why it's a genius strategy from Apple to make mobile browsing free from ads (Googles lifeblood), but I don't see why it's such a huge deal to Google; they already have a mobile platform of their own where ad blocking was always possible and widespread. You could see this step from Apple as an aggressive one towards Google, or just as reaching feature parity with Android on ad-blocking. What will be interesting is whether ad blocking will be widespread on iOS or if it will be like on desktop where it is a power user thing. If it's the former then it will change the web in a big way. If Apple really wanted to spread ad blocking and disrupt things they should make it an optional install when users first open the browser, "do you want to see ads when browsing", where answering no installs an ad-blocker which blocks all apps not on apples whitelist (which ad networks then pay a sizable sum to be on of course).
- tdkl 11y ago
  > where ad blocking was always possible and widespread. Majority of people don't root.
  - coldpie 11y ago
    Hmm? Firefox and ublock origin don't require root. It won't block in-app ads, but that's not what is being discussed here.
    - tdkl 11y ago
      What if I want to use Chrome or default Browser ?
JulianMorrison 11y ago
I want the advertising industry to die. And I honestly don't care what it takes down with it. If it hurts, we'll find ways around it, Patreon being a good example.
- toyg 11y ago
  Publicity is the lifeblood of commerce. As long as one seller exists, one or more advertisers will also exist to help him sell more. Sad but true.
  - JulianMorrison 11y ago
    If all ads get blocked, all advertisers go bust.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      There will always be advertising. The point is, we shouldn't tolerate anything but honest, decent one.
      - bigbugbag 11y ago
        why would there always be advertising? there wasn't any for about 400 000 years and we had it for a couple centuries ? a few milleniums at most.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        As long as there is more than one product competing for the same application and a benefit for the vendor from getting their product picked, there will be a pressure to convince people to choose in a particular way, i.e. advertising.
- yoz-y 11y ago
  In the current world of abundance, advertising is crucial to content and product producers. Let's say you make an application, how do you sell it if nobody knows about it? You make a nifty product, how do you make people know it exists? Advertising, in principle, is good, the way it is done currently on the Web is awful.
cognivore 11y ago
Lost in this debate, for me, is whether online ads actually work and are worth the money. My technical experience with online ads is that it's very difficult to equate the ads with increased sales unless you have a very small sample size. I've long suspected that online ads are actually more of a scam than anything else. Because you can't easily tie the expenditure to a benefit that ad sellers and hosters (Facebook, I'm looking at you) can promote them without having to back it up with quantifiable results. And that has led to a weird "ad ecosystem" which exists for its own purpose, not for actually trying to sell products (cause it doesn't actually work for that). I think the people most worried about the ad blockers are those that make their money from that ecosystem.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I have a similar impression. Moreover, I think people are actually seriously fooling themselves and each other. There's lot of tracking being done, lots of people looking at "metrics", but when I think about the statistics education of majority of people (including some professional "social media marketers" I know) I come to the conclusion that they don't understand what they're doing and can prove any conclusion they want with the numbers. All those metrics only help people to bullshit themselves and each other.
pinaceae 11y ago
well, let's look at someplace where ads truly work well. fashion print magazines. buy a vogue and look at the ads. hard to tell apart from the content, glossy, relevant, beautiful. they make up at least 70% of the whole magazine. i like gruber's ad system on DF, one of the few sites that seem to follow a user/reader centric approach. first you ensure the eyeballs, THEN you show the ads, always paranoid to piss off your readership. mobile safari adblock in ios9 will hopefully bring movement into this ad game.
- gabriel34 11y ago
  Ads can be content. The best ones usually are.
joshstrange 11y ago
Let me start off by saying I have clicked (on purpose) on less than 10 ads in my whole life. It's to the point that I have what can best be described as "Ad Blindness", I don't even see them anymore. So much so that sometimes I think I've reached the end of an article because my eyes have determined that below is only ads only to find it's an ad in the middle of the content or actually part of the article (Just to reiterate I sometimes gloss over real content that fits my mental model of an "ad"). I have used blockers a lot before (If I'm not going to click I'd rather not be tracked and deal with the bloat) but recently turned them all off to see what it's like again. It's still the same shit that I don't care about and have no intention of clicking on. 9 times out of 10 its for something I ALREADY PAY FOR (Looking at you DO, AWS, etc) which is annoying because not only do I have to look at it but it just highlights the gross inefficiencies in advertisements. I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless. Mobile is the big sticking point. On the desktop I could use an extension that reads some meta data out of a site's head to identify that site and mark it down for receiving a portion of "subscription fee" but on mobile this becomes much more of a challenge as I'm not willing to switch to a single-purpose browser (not that iOS would make it easy even if I did) and there are no browser extensions on mobile and no, I'm not going to do some gross "share" hack to record the sites I visit. I don't have an answer to all of this, it all sucks. I want to compensate content creators but other than pay-per-view ads (which I mentally block out if not with an ad blocker) I'm never going really help them as it stands currently.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > there are no browser extensions on mobile Not on iOS. Firefox on Android has extensions. > I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless. Lately I'm a big fan of Patreon, and an increasing number of the folks whose work I enjoy use it. If there are sites, channels, or any regular content you enjoy, and they don't have a subscription mechanism, send them a mail and ask them about adding one.
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
There's a mistake with the bloat diagram, the 8 KB : 6 MB pie chart. Bloat and article slices should be reversed in the diagram.
fridek 11y ago
It's funny how people saying ads should be replaced with a subscription model in different threads are going completely bananas about paywalled articles. Couple of web newspapers in my country switched recently to 10 articles a month for free and then asking for a subscription. It's awful, it makes me read less and I would prefer to see some ads I'm used to ignoring anyway. Usually I don't know if I like the content before I'm half-way through it. I also don't want to have 20 subscriptions pending every month just to have access to a reasonable portion of the internet. The web has already killed most of review and proofreading process in press. Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Let me show you a model of a decent web news paper that could get by with ads and no paywall: |----------------------------------| | MY AWESOME NEWSPAPER | |----------------------------------| | category | links | cool | topics | |----------------------------------| | Article Title | Ads | | | | | Article content arti | A bunch | | cle content article | of static| | content. | not | | | annoying | | |---------------| | ads | | | A cat picture | | | | |---------------| | | | | | | Article content arti | | | cle content article | | | content. | | | | | |----------------------------------| | footer links & copyright notices | |----------------------------------| Simple as that. Just don't shit on your users. If they have ad blockers, kindly ask them to whitelist your site. > Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it. What content quality?
  - norea-armozel 11y ago
    This is the basic format that I wish web designers would follow. Also, I wish ad networks wouldn't be sleazy and allow anyone to use their services (scammers, malware producers, and the like should be categorically banned from an ad network). If the latter was fixed then the former would be possible.
alyandon 11y ago
From another thread (still relevant I think): uBlock, NoScript and RequestPolicy are my tools to control the content my web browser displays. My general rule is that I'll only disable ad blocking on a few trusted sites and never on a site that uses a third-party advertising network. Most advertising networks have intrusive or annoying ads that actually block my ability to read a site by using pop-overs if my mouse cursor accidentally touches a keyword, divs that obscure content until I've paid sufficient attention to locate and click the "X", auto-playing sounds/videos, etc. If the UX wasn't bad enough, these third-party networks also present a security risk and have been used in the past as delivery vehicles for malware. In the end if a web site relies solely on intrusive advertising for support and they plead with me to disable adblocking, I'll most likely choose to stop reading/participating on the website rather than make an exception for them. I really wish the ability to make micropayments to publishers was a thing.
chmike 11y ago
Could the push functionality of HTTP/2 worsen the problem ? Ad block could limit the downloaded data by selecting it. With the push capability it won't be possible anymore. Network bandwidth could be wasted with the ads. Thebrowser could still filter its display though.

104 points by eamonncarey 11y ago

danr4 11y ago

It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice. Want to make money? try a subscription model. Why can't you have both? Welcome to the real world. [EDIT]: This was the previous opening sentence: "Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free." I changed it to a better analogy offered by AndrewKemendo in hope people would stop picking the analogy apart and focus on the message it's trying to deliver.

bpodgursky 11y ago
"Simple" doesn't mean correct. In practice cutting out ads probably makes you a more valuable customer because you've spent 10x the time most people spend looking at ads inspecting them while cutting. (and don't give any BS about "oh I actively avoid brands that advertise" -- brand advertising works, deal with it) The better analogy is, you cut out the ads, reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers. In the real world, this is not going to be legal.
- howeyc 11y ago
  I don't see where you're getting the "reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers" based on how ad blocking works. Ad block is at an individual level, there is no redistribution.
- afandian 11y ago
  There's no redistribution. Why does your analogy include redistribution? There's no need for an analogy anyway. It's equivalent of receiving a free magazine and the user putting it through an automatic ad-censoring machine before reading it.
- luso_brazilian 11y ago
  An even more apt analogy would be if a third party made an easy to use glass overlay that, when placed over a magazine page, obscured all the ads leaving only the content visible. Considering that is applied voluntarily and "client side" and no redistribution takes place I'm not sure that would be illegal considering current laws. Despite of that I believe publishing companies would be lobbying for laws to curb that practice as soon as it achieved critical mass and high enough adoption.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    All of the analogies given miss some major issues. Visual adds aren't the problem. Audio adds, adds that consume massive bandwidth that is limited, and add that track are all the problem. Normal visual adds can sometimes be nice, letting me know about products that I didn't previous know about that I might actually want to buy. But being tracked? Nope. Blocked!
- danr4 11y ago
  As stated in another comment, cutting them out can be an hypothetical ad cutting machine I 3D printed. The implementation detail of how i'm cutting out the ads is beside the point. The point is that I can offer my ad cutting services for free to anyone. I can tell all my friends - "Hey guys i'll come to your house and cut the ads out of the free magazines you're already receiving" Which is definitely not the same as "Hey guys I've received this magazine, and I cut the ads, here's the PDF" The reprint and redistribution parts are non-existent in ad blockers. the content is not hosted on adblockersite.com.
CSMastermind 11y ago
Newspapers have successfully used a combination of subscription and advertising for a century now.
- eli 11y ago
  Maybe not the best example: http://i.imgur.com/0mgT0AR.jpg http://i.imgur.com/0mgT0AR.jpg
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Not how up to the .com bust the newspapers were actually making more money than before. The collapse of the market took a heavy toll, both on newly minted online media as well as on established media that had made the jump to online.
    - eli 11y ago
      The downturn in revenue also coincides with the rapid expansion of Craigslist, which devoured the previously pretty reliable classifieds revenue. But print readership was going down for a while before then. TV news was on the rise. I think it was a lot of factors at once.
moron4hire 11y ago
I would pay for the NY Times or Washington Post if I knew having a paid subscription would remove the ads and give me a reasonable reading experience.
- eli 11y ago
  The problem with removing ads for paying subscribers is that it greatly devalues the remaining ad impressions -- who would want to reach just the people too disengaged or cheap to buy a subscription? It also incentivizes the site owner to have increasingly obtrusive and annoying ads for non-paying members.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    So how does Reddit manage to have ad-less subscriptions and yet still restrain themselves from creating obtrusive interstitial ads? Superhuman strength? Immortality? Some other heretofore unknown super power? The truth is, there is nothing on the NY Times or WaPo that is worth paying twice for.
    - eli 11y ago
      Reddit has its users create all the content for free. And AFAIK they still aren't profitable.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        You'd hope that the content produced by newspapers would rise above the level of reddit leading to people wanting to pay for the content directly. Of course if people are looking for entertainment then that's a different story and reddit may be serious competition.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        One would hope. The problem is, content produced on Reddit (and HN) is way better than content produced by newspapers, by a very simple mechanism: someone posts an article to Reddit/HN, people start debunking all the bullshit, misinterpretations and lies journalists wrote in that article. Newspapers have a lot of trust to regain with people. But then again, I suppose the general population doesn't give a rat's ass about the truth, and want to read only something shocking to use as a "social object" (i.e. something you can start discussing with other people you meet).
johnchristopher 11y ago
> Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Uh ? To cut the ads out you need to see them. Adblock hide them as if they never existed in the first place. Analogies, these days...
- pjc50 11y ago
  You can (and I do) from time to time cut out ads manually from the web with the DOM inspector. It's particularly good for screen-filling modals. Of course I can then make the cutout permanent with a hosts file or user-configurable adblocker ...
- danr4 11y ago
  Alright i'll bite. "I can cut them out" can be, as stated in another comment, an ad cutting physical machine. Your move.
- toyg 11y ago
  you could hand the magazine to a 3-year old who can't read, and he'll cut out all pictures for you. Nitpickers, these days...
  - johnchristopher 11y ago
    Are you really saying you would let a 3-year old operate that ad cutting physical machine mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995459 ? Adults, these days... :]
    - toyg 11y ago
      My 3-year-old is perfectly fine with a pair of safe scissors, as long as we keep him away from curtains and other should-not-cut materials. Luckily, we have no need for ad-cutting on kindle...
Nursie 11y ago
I think it's simple too, but doesn't need a meatspace analogy like that. I request some data, you send me some data. My computing device (yes MY computing device) then renders it in accordance with my wishes. That's it. (oh, and no, I have no obligation to play ball with your trackers)
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  That's why in the War on General Purpose Computing, publishers and advertisers are on the side of making the computing device not yours.
- jfoster 11y ago
  I actually think the people running sites are better off with this becoming the norm. Ads are not a great way to make money. Low friction paywalls will be great for everyone.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. I think you have the chain of events backwards. You are describing spam. A better analogy is that there are a hundred magazine providers waiting by your fence and then you ask them to throw you their magazines. You are right though that the consumer is empowered with technology to block or not block - but the broader problem is that consumers have shown over time that they aren't willing to pay for content (at scale) so they are left with making money somehow.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  It's like going to the stand and asking for a magazine. You have it given to you for free. Now it's yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, including giving it to a 3-year-old child to cut out the ads and throw them in a bin, so that you don't have to ever see them. It's yours, you have a right. Giving away the magazine for free was the choice of the person at the stand. If they want to profit, they have various means to do this. Ads are one way. Asking you for money when you ask for the magazine is another.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    Agreed. To extend the analogy though the customer sees the free one next to a quality paid one, chooses the free one and then complains about it having ads in it. At the end of the day, everyone wants a great experience for nothing. It's not possible.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > Agreed. To extend the analogy though the customer sees the free one next to a quality paid one, chooses the free one and then complains about it having ads in it. To improve it even further, based on my own experience and what I see in comments here, apparently you have like 1 quality paid stuff per 10 paid scams, 10 paid pieces of crap and 100 free stands. Those who want to pay for quality content quickly discover that it's incredibly hard to find. The analogy breaks down on the nature of the ads themselves. In physical magazines, ads are static and occupy fixed space on the pages. The off-line equivalent to what we have on-line would be ads carried by bugs inside the pages - moving, making sounds, hard to get rid of and occasionally biting you so you get sick and need to seek time-consuming and/or expensive care. Ads on-line are actively hostile. > At the end of the day, everyone wants a great experience for nothing. It's not possible. I agree.
chmike 11y ago
Exactly and for the subscription model to work provide quality content.
austenallred 11y ago
This comment rubs me in the wrong way. Content creators aren't "putting it up for free" - they're putting it up with ads attached. They're certainly not "throwing it over your fence." They're not injecting their articles into your browser, you're going to a URL to request them. You seek the content out. So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. That is what the company offered. Some of that is what allowed the company to create the content. You elect to not display that part using your client. I suppose that's your prerogative, but don't pretend like you're the victim in this. And also don't pretend like it's the company's fault for not choosing your preferred business model. You don't get to choose other companies' business models for them - you can either accept or reject what they offer. The reason they're not on a subscription business model is probably because that wouldn't be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use.
- mirimir 11y ago
  > So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. > You elect to not display that part using your client. That's not how ad-blockers work. They prevent ads from downloading. And so sites load faster, and mobile users pay less for throughput.
  - javery 11y ago
    This is not completely accurate - most ad blockers include both request blocking as well as content blocking. For instance it might not be able to block a sponsored tweet since it is returned with all of the other tweets, but it can hide that div on the page. Check any block list and you will see both rules.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      OK, thanks for the clarification. Nonetheless, many sites do load dramatically faster with ad blocking. That's especially so with high-latency connections. I often use Tor through nested VPN chains, and total latency can be 1-2 seconds. Some sites are unusable without AdBlock and NoScript.
- 11y ago
jerf 11y ago
Oh, the memories. I haven't seen this metaphor fight in like 8 years now, since web annotation basically died. And here we finally are with a version of this debate that people actually care about, because there's actual money at stake. Finally my years of prep are ready to pay off! First, I suggest everyone resist metaphors. Physical metaphors don't work here at all. For one thing, the "free content" may in the future decide that you can't load the content in the page until after the ads and trackers confirm that you have indeed loaded their content and executed it to some degree, which wrecks every physical metaphor you can come up with. Physical content is dead. Web content is code. It gets to do code-y things. No physical metaphor will keep up. Next, this obviously produces an arms race. The first iterations of this will be stupid and client-side, because it's cheap. When that doesn't work, server-side things can be done so that at the very least, you must download the ad; that can be confirmed fairly well in a non-forgeable way. The ads will also run arbitrary bits of code in an attempt to verify that they've really been shown; the client side plugins will retaliate by simulating the relevant code and not actually showing the ad. With the current state of web technology, this would stabilize in a sort of middle ground, where the client-side correctly doesn't render the ads, but the requisite requests to convince the server that you can see the content would by necessity still leak tracking information in order to convince the servers to show it at all. You could try to do things like use client-side stuff to scramble those values and share them among users or something, but that's fairly easy to detect at scale. Where that becomes particularly relevant though is that the clients at this point are becoming increasingly outright deceptive and duplicitious. Instead of passively failing to render ads, actively deceiving the remote systems opens a new door both legally and ethically. At some point after this the publishers have both a legal and ethical case that you are not merely "experiencing the content as you wish", but actively defrauding them. This, of course, won't stop people from arguing they have a right not to be tracked or advertised at, which means that they will essentially be arguing in favor of a right to have their programs make fradulent requests in order to get this "free" content. Which is fine and dandy locally, but consider what that means globally... and in particular, at this point how do you argue that it's ethically wrong to put trackers and ads in content, and for that matter even spyware, if the "other side" is retaliating in kind? If you're not careful with the ethics here you surprisingly find that you end up arguing in favor of the very things you thought you were arguing against, and end up making a "good for me but not for thee" argument, which even if you do end up believing that is still not a very powerful or compelling ethical/legal position. Pardon if I'm leaping about 4 steps further down the road than most people here are at... I worked this all out about 12 years ago. (It's a bit dated now and I cringe a bit at the writing style, as befits any writer linking to something they wrote 12 years ago, but you can see what I worked out at http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics . Perhaps remarkably, it is dead on topic for this very debate... there's a lot of related issues here.)
felipeerias 11y ago
"Here is the deal. I will tell you a story. But not just any story: an amazing story about this one person who did something unbelievable and you can't guess what happened next and also cats. In exchange, all you have to do is let these people (whom I don't actually know) track you and run their software on your computer, which will present a garish display of images (and maybe also sound and video, did I mention that I don't know these guys?). All you have to do then is click and I will get paid a fraction of a cent (and you will have to deal with whatever crap comes up afterwards). So what do you say?"
- voidz 11y ago
  Sounds like an offer I can't refuse! /i
userbinator 11y ago
my reading experience, my choice I'd extend that to say "my eyes, my ears, my brain." If I have the right to mute the volume, change the channel, or otherwise do something else when adverts appear on the TV, then I should also have the right to block them on a webpage - we're just using available technology to help us do it more effectively.
jusben1369 11y ago
To keep with the neighborly analogy what's happening is your neighbor is opening up his garage and lining it with magazines and comfortable seating for you to sit for free and read. However he's also lining his driveway with folks pitching you on goods and services on your way there. You're saying to heck with that and jumping over the fence right near the garage entrance and popping straight in. Your neighbor knows that type of abuse can occur and it's really up to them to decide how they want to handle it. But to pretend that you and he and the advertisers don't understand the implied relationship is disingenuous. For all those saying "get a subscription model!" remember this. A subscription model, by its very definition, implies that both of us expect a repeat, longer term relationship. Understand if that's the only way to monetize content on the internet it'll change the type and way content is created.

aikah 11y ago

> We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.” Something's fishy here. Is there any googler here that can respond to these claims ? > “Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at…Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? …[A]ny argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.” my thoughts exactly. "People" told the same things to the music industry. "You can't adapt, you should die", well let's see how ad networks and content producers survive the adblock revolution.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > what is to stop the ad being switched to something else (video, pr0n eptc) on the 3rd party server? That's when you're lucky. If you're unlucky it's malware injected via ad networks. Browsing the web without an adblocker is like sex with multiple partners every day without a condom.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Exactly. People don't block ads because they don't want content providers to get compensated. They block ads because they're actively hostile.
  - VLM 11y ago
    Bad analogy because that could be fun, although diseased. Ads are not fun. Its more like being a paramedic/EMT and not being allowed to wear gloves on call at blood covered scenes. Well I'm sorry that corporate policy won't let you wear gloves anymore but "we have to" keep profits up for the hepatitis and HIV treatment drug industries so you'll just have to deal with it. A standard HN automotive analogy would be working as a car mechanic while not being allowed to wear safety gear.

Donzo 11y ago

Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.

FroshKiller 11y ago
I personally never bothered with ad blocking until every other site hit me with stupid landing pages (like on Forbes), exhortations to try their mobile app instead of their site (every Tapatalk-enabled forum ever), pleas to take a feedback survey before I've even seen anything that warrants feedback (MSDN), and modal ads that don't load until I try to scroll down to continue reading the content (soooooooooooo many blogs).
- moron4hire 11y ago
  It has really gotten bad. It's all a desperate grasp for ever shrinking ad dollars. Users get wise to the tactics and develop coping behaviors. You can track our eye movements and see we don't ever once even look at the common areas where ads lie. Popup boxes get closed in less than a second, with many people not even registering that it ever opened [0]. I've personally taken to sliding my cursor past the top edge of the page to see if the "subscribe to our mailing list" dialog appears, in some cases bailing on the article completely just because it's not valuable enough to me to bother after that affront. Major advertisers are swooning over 0.5% click through rates! That's not just random chance, that's a set of users highly-trained in the art of dodging ads, with an extremely-low-but-not-yet-zero failure rate! Advertising is dead. Good riddance. [0] Which has also killed the modal informational dialog in desktop applications. I've ran training sessions for internal enterprise software and the users literally could not remember there was a dialog mere seconds after dismissing it.
  - AnonymousPlanet 11y ago
    You seem to easily shrug off your conclusion. But it makes me shiver to think about that future. If advertising is dead, what else is Google going to do with all that data it has on us? Sell to the highest bidder?

cstross 11y ago

A secondary effect: ad blockers not only improve the web experience for users (making everything load faster, by blocking unwanted spurious crap), ad blockers are good for the cellcos as long as net neutrality holds true. Absent net-neut cellcos could in principle charge advertisers for access, but in a net-neut environment there's no money to be gained by carrying the traffic. Traffic which impairs the UX for the paying customers (the smartphone and tablet users). This is going to be an interesting dilemma for that strong proponent of network neutrality, Google, uh, DoubleClick, right? (Unless they go the third-order route and roll out their own LTE data network, where of course they'll be the advertising gatekeeper and maybe folks who DPI indicates are using ad blockers will get a reduced speed of service ...)

alkonaut 11y ago

I understand why it's a genius strategy from Apple to make mobile browsing free from ads (Googles lifeblood), but I don't see why it's such a huge deal to Google; they already have a mobile platform of their own where ad blocking was always possible and widespread. You could see this step from Apple as an aggressive one towards Google, or just as reaching feature parity with Android on ad-blocking. What will be interesting is whether ad blocking will be widespread on iOS or if it will be like on desktop where it is a power user thing. If it's the former then it will change the web in a big way. If Apple really wanted to spread ad blocking and disrupt things they should make it an optional install when users first open the browser, "do you want to see ads when browsing", where answering no installs an ad-blocker which blocks all apps not on apples whitelist (which ad networks then pay a sizable sum to be on of course).

tdkl 11y ago
> where ad blocking was always possible and widespread. Majority of people don't root.
- coldpie 11y ago
  Hmm? Firefox and ublock origin don't require root. It won't block in-app ads, but that's not what is being discussed here.
  - tdkl 11y ago
    What if I want to use Chrome or default Browser ?

JulianMorrison 11y ago

I want the advertising industry to die. And I honestly don't care what it takes down with it. If it hurts, we'll find ways around it, Patreon being a good example.

toyg 11y ago
Publicity is the lifeblood of commerce. As long as one seller exists, one or more advertisers will also exist to help him sell more. Sad but true.
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  If all ads get blocked, all advertisers go bust.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    There will always be advertising. The point is, we shouldn't tolerate anything but honest, decent one.
    - bigbugbag 11y ago
      why would there always be advertising? there wasn't any for about 400 000 years and we had it for a couple centuries ? a few milleniums at most.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        As long as there is more than one product competing for the same application and a benefit for the vendor from getting their product picked, there will be a pressure to convince people to choose in a particular way, i.e. advertising.
yoz-y 11y ago
In the current world of abundance, advertising is crucial to content and product producers. Let's say you make an application, how do you sell it if nobody knows about it? You make a nifty product, how do you make people know it exists? Advertising, in principle, is good, the way it is done currently on the Web is awful.

cognivore 11y ago

Lost in this debate, for me, is whether online ads actually work and are worth the money. My technical experience with online ads is that it's very difficult to equate the ads with increased sales unless you have a very small sample size. I've long suspected that online ads are actually more of a scam than anything else. Because you can't easily tie the expenditure to a benefit that ad sellers and hosters (Facebook, I'm looking at you) can promote them without having to back it up with quantifiable results. And that has led to a weird "ad ecosystem" which exists for its own purpose, not for actually trying to sell products (cause it doesn't actually work for that). I think the people most worried about the ad blockers are those that make their money from that ecosystem.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I have a similar impression. Moreover, I think people are actually seriously fooling themselves and each other. There's lot of tracking being done, lots of people looking at "metrics", but when I think about the statistics education of majority of people (including some professional "social media marketers" I know) I come to the conclusion that they don't understand what they're doing and can prove any conclusion they want with the numbers. All those metrics only help people to bullshit themselves and each other.

pinaceae 11y ago

well, let's look at someplace where ads truly work well. fashion print magazines. buy a vogue and look at the ads. hard to tell apart from the content, glossy, relevant, beautiful. they make up at least 70% of the whole magazine. i like gruber's ad system on DF, one of the few sites that seem to follow a user/reader centric approach. first you ensure the eyeballs, THEN you show the ads, always paranoid to piss off your readership. mobile safari adblock in ios9 will hopefully bring movement into this ad game.

gabriel34 11y ago
Ads can be content. The best ones usually are.

joshstrange 11y ago

Let me start off by saying I have clicked (on purpose) on less than 10 ads in my whole life. It's to the point that I have what can best be described as "Ad Blindness", I don't even see them anymore. So much so that sometimes I think I've reached the end of an article because my eyes have determined that below is only ads only to find it's an ad in the middle of the content or actually part of the article (Just to reiterate I sometimes gloss over real content that fits my mental model of an "ad"). I have used blockers a lot before (If I'm not going to click I'd rather not be tracked and deal with the bloat) but recently turned them all off to see what it's like again. It's still the same shit that I don't care about and have no intention of clicking on. 9 times out of 10 its for something I ALREADY PAY FOR (Looking at you DO, AWS, etc) which is annoying because not only do I have to look at it but it just highlights the gross inefficiencies in advertisements. I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless. Mobile is the big sticking point. On the desktop I could use an extension that reads some meta data out of a site's head to identify that site and mark it down for receiving a portion of "subscription fee" but on mobile this becomes much more of a challenge as I'm not willing to switch to a single-purpose browser (not that iOS would make it easy even if I did) and there are no browser extensions on mobile and no, I'm not going to do some gross "share" hack to record the sites I visit. I don't have an answer to all of this, it all sucks. I want to compensate content creators but other than pay-per-view ads (which I mentally block out if not with an ad blocker) I'm never going really help them as it stands currently.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
> there are no browser extensions on mobile Not on iOS. Firefox on Android has extensions. > I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless. Lately I'm a big fan of Patreon, and an increasing number of the folks whose work I enjoy use it. If there are sites, channels, or any regular content you enjoy, and they don't have a subscription mechanism, send them a mail and ask them about adding one.

gamesbrainiac 11y ago

There's a mistake with the bloat diagram, the 8 KB : 6 MB pie chart. Bloat and article slices should be reversed in the diagram.

fridek 11y ago

It's funny how people saying ads should be replaced with a subscription model in different threads are going completely bananas about paywalled articles. Couple of web newspapers in my country switched recently to 10 articles a month for free and then asking for a subscription. It's awful, it makes me read less and I would prefer to see some ads I'm used to ignoring anyway. Usually I don't know if I like the content before I'm half-way through it. I also don't want to have 20 subscriptions pending every month just to have access to a reasonable portion of the internet. The web has already killed most of review and proofreading process in press. Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Let me show you a model of a decent web news paper that could get by with ads and no paywall: |----------------------------------| | MY AWESOME NEWSPAPER | |----------------------------------| | category | links | cool | topics | |----------------------------------| | Article Title | Ads | | | | | Article content arti | A bunch | | cle content article | of static| | content. | not | | | annoying | | |---------------| | ads | | | A cat picture | | | | |---------------| | | | | | | Article content arti | | | cle content article | | | content. | | | | | |----------------------------------| | footer links & copyright notices | |----------------------------------| Simple as that. Just don't shit on your users. If they have ad blockers, kindly ask them to whitelist your site. > Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it. What content quality?
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  This is the basic format that I wish web designers would follow. Also, I wish ad networks wouldn't be sleazy and allow anyone to use their services (scammers, malware producers, and the like should be categorically banned from an ad network). If the latter was fixed then the former would be possible.

alyandon 11y ago

From another thread (still relevant I think): uBlock, NoScript and RequestPolicy are my tools to control the content my web browser displays. My general rule is that I'll only disable ad blocking on a few trusted sites and never on a site that uses a third-party advertising network. Most advertising networks have intrusive or annoying ads that actually block my ability to read a site by using pop-overs if my mouse cursor accidentally touches a keyword, divs that obscure content until I've paid sufficient attention to locate and click the "X", auto-playing sounds/videos, etc. If the UX wasn't bad enough, these third-party networks also present a security risk and have been used in the past as delivery vehicles for malware. In the end if a web site relies solely on intrusive advertising for support and they plead with me to disable adblocking, I'll most likely choose to stop reading/participating on the website rather than make an exception for them. I really wish the ability to make micropayments to publishers was a thing.

chmike 11y ago

Could the push functionality of HTTP/2 worsen the problem ? Ad block could limit the downloaded data by selecting it. With the push capability it won't be possible anymore. Network bandwidth could be wasted with the ads. Thebrowser could still filter its display though.